While phishing-related malware is still mostly Windows targeting, attacks that rely purely on social engineering and fake web sites might be delivered by any platform, including smartphones and tablets. The more cautious you are, the better informed you are, and the more you think before you click, the more chance you have of leaving phishing craft stranded.

(All four blog articles in this series, of which this article is the last, are available as a single paper here: The_Thoughtful_Phisher_Revisited.) From the sort of ‘visit this link and update or we’ll cancel your account’ message that we saw in the previous blog in this series (The Less Thoughtful Phisher), it’s a short step

Less innovative than the scam mails described in my previous articles (Phish to phry and The Thoughtful Phisher II), there are those phish messages that suggest a problem with your account that they need you to log in to fix. (Of course, you aren’t really logging in to a legitimate site.) Mostly their appeal is

In the previous Thoughtful Phisher blog, we looked at some visual clues that should tip you off that a email from a ‘bank’ is not to be trusted. Just as interesting here, though, is the variety of social engineering gambits used by this wave of phish campaigns. It’s worth taking a closer look at some

[A much shorter version of this article appeared in the October 2013 Threat Radar Report as ‘The Thoughtful Phisher’. As these particular scam/spam campaigns don’t seem to be diminishing, however – indeed, some of the phishing techniques seem to be getting more sophisticated – I thought perhaps it was worth updating and expanding for a

Spear-phishing is creating a new era of cybercrime, according to Chris Dixon, a partner at venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz – and in terms of its threat to enterprise, it’s comparable to a “super strain of bacteria.”

[A shorter version of this article was originally published – without illustrations – on the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s eCrime blog.] Phishing attacks targeting academia aren’t the most high-profile of attacks, though they’re more common than you might think. Student populations in themselves constitute a sizeable pool of potential victims for money mule recruitment and other

Recently we realized that from time to time when people find a live link in one of our blogs, they click on it to see where it goes, even though the context might suggest that the link could be malicious. So we thought it might be a good idea to set up a link so

The new ESET blog format must be striking a real chord with people. At any rate, job offers are just pouring in. Except that they don’t seem to be jobs for security bloggers, or for web developers like the team that maintains this site.

Below, you can see the textual part of a bank phishing email I received today (it also contained a Smile logo, which was the only graphical content). Here’s the message text from the phishing email: Dear Account Holder, Do you know that with Smile Internet banking, you can eliminate the cost of receiving and transferring